Who Owns the Results of Publicly funded Scientific Inquiry?

The National Institute of Health's (NIH) new policy is ruffling some feathers in the publishing industry. The growing riff is detailed in a recent blog posting in Salon.com which detailed the publishers backlash against the NIH policy of open access for research it funds.

Battle Lines for access, and copyright are being drawn for publicly funded as well as privately funded ( Howard Hughs Medical Institute, HHMI) and Burroughs Wellcome funded research. At the core of the issue is the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 sponsored by senators Cornyn and Lieberman. The rationale for the legislation is "

Because U.S. taxpayers underwrite this research, they have a right to expect that it's dissemination and use will be maximized, and that they themselves will have access to it.

Although this premise sounds simple enough, there has been a significant backlash among scientific publishers. They have formed an organization called the Prism Coalition as a means of lobbying against the Public Access Act of 2006. Their main argument and rationale is that since they organize the peer review process, they should own the copyrights of such publications and control access.

This is an example of how the digital age is forcing scientists to re-examine the epistemological foundations of scientific inquiry. Before the age of online archives, the Federal Government and other funding agencies were not interested in copyrights of their research because they had no interest in the mechanics of producing hard copy journals. Since journal articles are now most often communicated and viewed electronically, access has become an issue. Inexpensive or free software can typeset articles in the appropriate format, and online archives can easily house the resulting description of the relevant research.

If this emerging battle were an event that I could lay odds on, I would bet on the Federal Government Agencies to win, but only in the long haul. The powerful lobbyists are not going to make free access to research easy for the worlds researchers.

No Child Left Behind is Designed by Corporate Interests, not Educators

The Phrase "No Child Left Behind" is a politically designed euphemism intended to present the appearance of concern for learners while it in fact is a destructive program designed to produce windfall profits for foreign corporations. Perhaps the best analysis and demonstration of this statement has been developed by Jonathan Kozol and recently discussed in an interview in Salon.com .

I recommended to the Democrats that they replace these tests with
diagnostic tests, which are given individually by the teacher to her students.
They are anxiety-free and you don't have to wait six months for McGraw-Hill or Harcourt to mis-score them, as they often do. The teacher gets results immediately. And it's not time stolen from education because she actually learns while she's giving this test.

What Kozol is trying to communicate here is that there are two types of
assessment, formative and summative. NCLB is forcing schools to spend too much
time and resources on summative assessments, at the expense of actual
instruction and formative assessment. Only formative assessment is actually beneficial to students and considered part of the education process.The phrase "no child left behind" is designed to be a pseudo-patriotic catch phrase designed to eliminate consideration of the best ways to help learners. Using catch phrases in this manor is merely a way for corporations to steal money intended to benefit students in the same way many unscrupulous defense contractors steal money intended to support the troops, all the while they are endlessly repeating the mantra "support the troops".